Explain why the notion that cultures can be distinguished as either oral or written is a mistaken understanding as to how culture works

In explaining why categorizing cultures as oral and written is a mistaken understanding of how they work, one must consider whether or not a clear distinction between orality and literacy can be made. In this blog post, basing myself on MacNeil’s publication on orality, and on Chamberlin’s If This is Your Land, Where Are Your Stories?: Finding Common Ground, I give an attempt at explaining why cultures cannot be distinguished by such categories due to the interrelated nature of literacy and orality. 

Before the earliest invention of writing  (3200 BC in ancient Sumeria), the peoples of our world relied on oral performance to communicate, share, and celebrate their beliefs. They used drawings and pictographs to represent their beliefs and ideas, and used oral speech to communicate them amongst each other.

It is an accepted theory that the invention of writing stemmed from the basis of existing pictographs and ideographs. Thus if we can consider orality as the primary manner in which humans communicated, and if we can consider literature as stemming from the visual performance attached to oral cultures, literature and orality cannot be separated. They are innately interrelated. Distinguishing between the two would in effect, create a gap between past and present. The present is what it is, because of past actions that led it to be as such. Just as literature is what it is because of humanity’s ancient traditions of orality. Distinguishing between orality and literature would fracture the story that explains how we got from orality to literacy. 

Drawing on Meschonnic’s definition of orality, Courtney MacNeil describes orality as not being ‘the opposition of writing, but rather a catalyst of communication more generally, which is part of both writing and speech”.  Donald Wesling and Teudeusz Slawek, also add on to the definition of orality as something that ‘is not what is spoken, but what allows one to speak.” In viewing orality as a catalyst to human communication, we must also view orality as the catalyst to literature, in the sense that literature is also a human effort to communicate. In this regard, literacy and orality cannot be separated. 

Now, moving away from the beginnings of literature and how they are intertwined with orality, let’s move on to how literature and orality are intertwined in the modern world. In her publication, Courtney MacNeil mentions the effect of technological advances, more specifically in the area of cyberspace, on how we see literacy and orality. In the modern world, mediums such as Skype, or phone technologies, allow us to facilitate oral communication. What’s so interesting and somewhat paradoxal about cyberspace, is that it allows us to use oral communication, using a medium that was constructed based on text. For instance, the phone, along with many modern electronic products we use, are based on a binary number system. But to have invented the phone, to have invented the binary codes that would allow them to function in the way that they do, someone, or a group of people had to come up with that idea and communicate it orally, before plans could be made to invent such a thing. So, if orality is to be considered a catalyst of communication, orality in its relation to communication technologies, can also be considered the catalyst to their invention.

In If This is Your Land, Then Where are Your Stories? Finding Common Ground, Chamberlin mentions that “all so-called oral cultures are rich in forms of writing, albeit non-syllabic and non-alphabetic ones”(32) and cites “woven and beaded belts and blankets”(32) as examples of the forms of writing he speaks of. He then contrasts our modern “supposedly written cultures”(32) with the oral cultures afore mentioned, and describes them as having “areas of strictly defined and highly formalized oral traditions”(32). This speaks once again to how interwoven orality and literacy are in the modern culture many consider ‘written’ , and also suggests a wider definition of ‘writing’.  Perhaps writing is not just defined by what I’m doing right now, perhaps it cannot simply be defined by the action of putting words on paper wether cyber-paper (like this Pages document) or real paper you can feel and touch. 

I mentioned earlier that the invention of writing was done on the basis of already existing pictographs and ideograms. Let’s consider the Chinese alphabet, one very unique as compared to the couple dozen letter alphabets that the Western world commonly uses. The accepted theory is that the Chinese alphabet stems from non-linguistic symbols, or pictograms and that over time these non-linguistic visual symbols, evolved into the modern Chinese alphabet. Before Chinese pictograms became alphabetized, they were just simple visual representations of symbols recognizable to those engaged with the culture. Writing was not alphabetized, but much more picturesque. The beaded belts and blankets that Chamberlin speaks of can perhaps be considered the same way; a form of writing specific to a culture, and going hand in hand with its oral traditions. With this in mind, one can consider that there are many forms of ‘writing’ and ‘literacy’. Literacy doesn’t necessarily have to be constricted to the ability to read and write, but could be extended to the ability of listening and representing speech in visual form. 

Drawing from the examples and citations I’ve described, distinguishing cultures between oral and written is an inevitably flawed way of classifying cultures, as it suggests an underlying distinction between orality and literacy. If orality and literacy cannot be completely separated from one another, then neither can so-called written and oral cultures. 

Works cited:

Chamberlin, J. Edward. If This Is Your Land, Where Are Your Stories?: Finding Common Ground. Toronto: A.A. Knopf Canada, 2003. Print.

Linguistics 201: The Invention of Writing.” Linguistics 201: The Invention of Writing. Western Washington University, n.d. Web. 22 Jan. 2016. <http://cii.wwu.edu//vajda/ling201/test4materials/Writing2.htm>

Lo, Lawrence K. “Ancient Scripts: Chinese.” Ancient Scripts: Chinese. N.p., n.d. Web. 22 Jan. 2016. <http://www.ancientscripts.com/chinese.html>

MacNeil, Courtney. “The Chicago School of Media Theory Theorizing Media since 2003.” The Chicago School of Media Theory RSS. WordPress, 2007. Web. 22 Jan. 2016.